God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter
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In God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World, New York Times bestselling author of Religious Literacy and religion scholar Stephen Prothero argues that persistent attempts to portray all religions as different paths to the same God overlook the distinct problem that each tradition seeks to solve. Delving into the different problems and solutions that Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Confucianism, Yoruba Religion, Daoism and Atheism strive to combat, God is Not One is an indispensable guide to the questions human beings have asked for millennia—and to the disparate paths we are taking to answer them today. Readers of Huston Smith and Karen Armstrong will find much to ponder in God is Not One.
Stephen Prothero
Stephen Prothero is the New York Times bestselling author of Religious Literacy and God Is Not One and a professor of religion at Boston University. His work has been featured on the cover of TIME magazine, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, NPR, and other top national media outlets. He writes and reviews for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, The Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Slate, and other publications. Visit the author at www.stephenprothero.com or follow his tweets @sprothero.
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Reviews for God Is Not One
123 ratings17 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I enjoyed this book and agree with its premise. The religions are different and those differences should be understood and appreciated.He compares the religions on the objective criteria of the diagnosis of the human condition, the offered solution, the technique to implement the solution, and the human exemplar of the faith.I much prefer this approach to that of Huston Smith who seemed to write of religions from a Christian perspective and to see in all religions their essential oneness with Christianity.Prothero discusses some of the founding myths, some of the histories, the heroes of the faiths and their various versions. He looks at Islam, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoruba (a previously unknown religion for me), Judaism, and Daoism. He has a short chapter on Atheism, which he did not develop sufficiently. Atheism is deserving I think at least similar treatment. He suggests that Atheism is not as influential as the great religions, and while that might be true, Atheism is growing in influence. That growth suggests its coming importance. Prothero basically suggests that for Atheism, religion is the problem. And I don't think he is accurate in that presentation of Atheism. I think the Way of Reason is more than a negative proposition.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The author intends to enlighten his audience by briefly covering eight major religions. I say briefly since it is the equivalent of looking at the seven wonders of the world by looking out the window of a speeding car. He makes the assumption that people know absolutely nothing about any of these religions with his target audience ignorant atheists. Prothero makes allusions to those who would blur the difference between religions as atheists as well. What puzzled me was that the book covers only the barest of fundamentals for each religion and discusses them from an intellectual perspective. I assume he does that to convince atheists to the difference, but I felt faith is left out of the discussion. That's a rather important part if not the most important. The content is so brief and goes over only the barest of fundamentals, the founder, how it spread, and core beliefs. He disputes many authors who have chosen to blur the lines of religion, but his edges aren't really sharp enough to dispute them. Yes a Jesus is different from Buddha and creating common ground between them is a simplification, but he doesn't really dispute those concepts when discussing each religion. He states that a religion could be like a sport, in baseball, you win the game by scoring the most runs, in Basketball you win by scoring the most points. I find that's a weak distinction since the principles are the same, just the games are played differently. That also doesn't counter much of the purpose of authors and leaders attempting to find harmony among religions. I would agree that in many cases, these attempts don't seem to stop people from killing each other over religious differences and I would agree that understanding the distinctions lead to tolerance and acceptance. Overall, I found the book to be disappointing and needed more than a basic description of religion and how they are practices. I needed to feel more of the why of the believers. Why do they believe this is the way and why those differences are important. He doesn't cover that and I thought it was the point of the book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Accessible, informative, insightful. Highly recommended.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I found God is Not One mildly interesting, but not especially compelling. The main substance of the book is eight chapters describing in some depth the eight great world religions: Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Yoruba Religion, Judaism, and Daoism, with an additional shorter "coda" on atheism. In the introduction and conclusion Prothero argues that these religions are not in fact all the same or striving towards the same thing, and that the way to live with diversity is to better understand it in all its glory.
I understand and agree for the most part with Prothero's argument that the religions are not all the same, but I don't think I ever particularly thought they were all the same, so I didn't especially need convincing on this point. Prothero's framework for describing the religions is this idea that each religion views some problem with the world and presents a solution; for example, Christianity views the problem as sin and the solution as salvation. I found this to be a rather simplistic perspective (which he does in fact admit himself) and, more significantly, not very useful in helping me better understand religion. Reading descriptions of the practices and beliefs of each religion is all well and good, but I don't feel that I actually understand religious people any better now. Prothero's descriptions of the religions were certainly thorough, but I found them a bit dry and abstract. I agree wholeheartedly that in order to peacefully coexist with people different from ourselves, we need to understand their context, including their religious context, but I don't think that the knowledge I gained from God is Not One is sufficient for this. After all, each individual is different and unique in how they personally interpret, understand, and practice their religion, and therefore the only true way to gain understanding is to get to know individual people and hear their personal perspectives and experiences with their religion.
I additionally did not particularly like Prothero's chapter on atheism. For one thing, he claims it is a religion, and for another, he spent the majority of the chapter on the "New Atheists" who are quite stringently anti-religious and very likely do not represent the majority of atheists. Overall, the chapter demonstrated to me a lack of understanding on Prothero's part as to what it really means to be an atheist.
Through-out my reading of the book, I was reminded of a quote by F. Forrester Church that I read in another book: "Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die." For me, this quote does far more towards helping me understand religion than all of God is Not One. I finished this book realizing that what I really wanted to understand is the psychology of religion - how it is that so many people believe things that, to me, seem completely wacko. With this in mind, I went to the library today and found a book titled The Religious Case Against Belief, by James P. Carse. His premise is that there is in fact a distinction between religion and belief (which would mean my earlier sentence is incorrectly conflating religion and belief), and I look forward to reading what he has to say. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Stephen Prothero, a professor of religious studies, is passionate about religions and their differences. He believes that religious literacy is an essential surivival skill in the modern world.In _God is Not One_, Prothero gives clear descriptions of the eight most influential religions in the world (Islam, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Yoruba, Buddhism, Judaism and Daoism), showing how they are different one from another, and how their practice affects society.As a former teacher of religious education, I wish I had a text like this, engaging, informative, encylopedic, for my own interest as well as for my students.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All is not sweetness and light on the religious front, this does not surprise me. I was impressed and intetrested by his coverage of the one I had never heard of, Yoruba. I was dismayed by his use of statistics, page 85, parapharsed, "in 1800 23% of the world was Christian, between 1815 and 1915 the number of Christian's in the US jumped 10 fold," the total population jumped something considerable. there are other comparisions of percentage increases and total numbers increases as if they were the same.The brief coda on atheism says "it has aways been for elites rather than ordinary folk" and had no impact before the 20th centuary, next paragraph " Buddists, Jains and some Hindus also denied a personnal god" AH, Buddists's had no impact?
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book delivered exactly what I wanted--basic religious literacy. It lays out the basic beliefs, themes and practices of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Daoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Yoruba and Buddhism with clear and engaging writing. That's a tall order, and sometimes it gets kind of dense, but given the task, Prothero did a great job. His tone remains objective and his focus is on helping the reader appreciate the differences between religions without favoring one over another. This approach is geared at offering a means to understand how religion affects and influences society and culture in broader ways. At the end is an excellent essay on atheism.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ignore the "Run the World" part of the title - the important part is "Why Their Differences Matter". Prothero makes an important argument: that all the religions of the world are not, in fact, the same, and that if we're serious about coexisting, we should really learn who we're coexisting with.
I didn't know much at all about some of the religions discussed in this book, so I also learned a fair bit about them specifically. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was the final book we read for the Ill Fated Muslim Book Club.Stephen Prothero's argument is that the eight biggest relgions in the world (and he even makes some space for atheists!) are all standing on different 'spiritual mountaintops' and as such are approaching God from completely different and incompatible angles. He tries to sum up each major religion by one word or theme. Chances are, if it is your religion, you will feel he has not touched upon all the 'depth' of your faith -yet he has covered those 'other people's relgion' just fine! The book club concensus was that Prof. Prothero had not made a compelling case for his "they are all completely different" argument- still too much gray area in this.My husband chose this book, in large part, because there is an extensive section on Yoruba religions. Since many Western religion books overlook the contribution of African religion and culture, this was a very nice introduction to this complicated and story-rich tradition. I loved the Yoruba tales.Alas, the Muslims couldn't be bothered to read about other people's religions. We had our lowest turn-out ever. Only one other person had read the entire book. The other couple that turned up admitted they had only read the Islam section and found it too thin.This was the book that broke the Ill Fated Muslim Book Club. After this book, came Ramadan, my husband followed my advice, and the Ill Fated Muslim Book Club died with a whimper.My husband concluded, "People like the IDEA of a book club, they can pretend to be intellectuals. But when it comes to the actual work, the actual DOING of being an intellectual (reading, thinking, discussing), they don't want to do that." We had confronted, up close and personal, the Poseur mentality.So that's my story of the Ill Fated Muslim Book Club. We had a list of 30 people, we live in a community that prides itself on their economic and intellectual prowess, many consider themselves leaders and role models. Despite all this "promise", we couldn't make it work. Now if we had gotten the local shaykh to get involved.....
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Prothero argues that all religions are not looking at the same thing from a different perspective, but instead look at different things altogether. He does this by presenting an individual chapter each on Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Yoruba, Judaism, and Daoism (with a coda on Atheism) and outlining their basic beliefs and what their actual focus is on. He presents strongly that not all religions are about getting in to a nice afterlife, or even really about the afterlife at all.I was excited that this book had a significant chapter on Yoruba, something which is overlooked in most other comparative religion books. He also has a bit of a rant about religious scholars who ignore Yoruba because it is not a religion of text, but instead one of oral tradition.Where this book fails is on the actual argument. The book didn't convince me that all religions are totally separate, and he does talk about similarities between them quite a lot. In fact, if you ignore the introduction and conclusion, you could read his book and take away that nearly all religions are actually different aspects of the same wider faith.But the overviews of each religion were interesting and well written for a lay audience.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A very readable overview of the eight religious beliefs/practices with the most influence on the modern world: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Yoruba, Judaism, and Daoism. Includes common beliefs and practices, as well as the social manifestations / implications of those beliefs. Overall, the tone is very open, respectful and engaged. Even while I found some areas in which I didn't necessarily agree with the author's conclusions, I could (usually) understand why he came to them. Of course, with a scope this broad, it can't get into much depth; fortunately, the author provides plentiful endnotes. The only area where I found the book lacking was it's presentation of Christianity and the form of atheism related to it. The screed at the end against what the author calls New Atheism or angry atheism was an unfortunate coda for an otherwise thoughtful book; he seems unable to see the broader context in which this movement exists, and his blatant antipathy to Christian-reactive atheism almost completely undercut the whole "respect through understanding divergent beliefs" point of the book. (Interestingly, he's quite sanguine about atheism within the context of other religions. Also interesting, to me, was the complete lack of mention of questions about the historicity of Jesus, when he does mention similar debates within several other religions.)Those problems aside, I do think this is a great introduction to world religions for people with an honest desire to understand them on their own terms.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An excellent overview of eight major religions and a good counterpoint to our cultural tendency to minimize differences between religions, instead of respecting each other across our deep differences.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very good book, until the end when he goes on a ridiculous rant about whether or not Atheism is a religion. At that point he simply sounded like so many other religious shills who need to complain about atheism to sell books. Soured me on the entire thing. No more Stephen Prothero for me.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Religion remains the holder of traditions which influence the world, and many liberals portray them as different paths to the same "truths". Although he never explains exactly what is "dangerous" about this universalist discernment, Stephen Prothero disagrees. Ironically, however, in this accessible and scholarly work, Prothero displays their differences such an engaging and sympathetic way that he creates the compassion which is the underlying unity of Religions. And importantly for "comparing and contrasting", this work presents a system for analyzing the eight largest "faiths". We all do this, because beliefs are always "rivals". He fairly notes that there are similarities, but he flags their differences. He suggests that the universalism of their themes is an "Atheist lie". [66] However, he fails to demonstrate that Religious difference are more fundamental than their similarities. He suggests that the factions within each Religion are monuments to the differences. [66]. Many of us disagree, since many of the sects within each Religion expose "difference without a difference". Schisms within the Protestants and Muslims are more profound than between them, facts which Prothero in fact acknowledges. There are, of course, historical conflicts between nations--involving panoplies of political, economic, and cultural belief systems. Prothero systematically presents eight rival religions, starting with the "most influential" (not "largest"): Islam: The Way of Submission, Christianity: The Way of Salvation, Confucianism: The way of Propriety, Hinduism: The Way of Devotion, Buddhism: The Way of Awakening, Yoruba: The Way of Connection, Judaism: The Way of Exile and Return, and Daoism: The Way of Flourishing. In the 9th Chapter a Brief Coda on Atheism: The Way of Reason. The subtitles he attaches are his own, which he uses to take us into and across these eight silos of Faith. ‘“The Tao has ten thousand gates,’ say the masters, and it is up to each of us to find our own.” Prothero describes the comparison: “To explore the great religions is to wander through these ten thousand gates. It is to enter into the Hindu conversations on the logic of karma and rebirth, Christian conversation on the mechanics of sin and resurrection, and Daoist conversations on flourishing here and now (and perhaps forever). It is also to encounter rivalries between Hindus and Muslims in India, between Jews and Muslims in Israel, and between Christians and Yoruba practitioners in Nigeria. Each of these rivals offers a different vision of “a human being fully alive.” Religions diagnose the human problem, prescribe cures, and provide models for living. For Muslims, pride is the problem, the solution is submission in an orthopraxy devoted to a metaphor of Five Pillars--saying the Shahadah, salat (prayer), zakat (charity), sawm (fasting), and hajj (pilgrimmage). The exemplar is Muhammad [38]. Citing Wilfred Smith, Prothero sees a parallel between Jesus and the Quran. "Whereas the Word of God that is Jesus came into the wold through the pure vessel of a woman who had never had sex, the Word of God that is the Quran came into the world through the pure vessel of a man who could neither read nor write. Reciting the Quran, therefore, is like partaking of the Christian Eucharist. It is how you incorporate the divine into your body." [39] While adding these astonishing parallels, Prothero inexplicably drops the women out of the history of Muslims--his first converts, transcribers of his dictations, and Aisha as the author of most of the Hadiths. The Quran is preoccupied with doctrine rather than narrative, telling How Muslims should do things. The suras are presented in order of their length. A persistent social theme is justice, forcefully and frequently on behalf of the helpless and poor. [42] Islam emphasizes life after death--"Hundreds of verses detail the horrors of hell, the splendors of Paradise, the rewards awaiting martyrs, the mechanics of the resurrection, and the prophesies and procedures of the Day of Judgement." [43] The Quran (and the prophets) warn us not to forget. So the Quran is revelation recited, and reminder to remember. Prothero provides frequent citations to the Holy Quran, in a granular study of text.Christians say Sin is the problem, and salvation is the solution; Confucius taught that education and ritual are key techniques. "Over the long haul of human history, Confucianism may have carried more clout than any other religion." [101] The Analects provide the Golden Rule before Jesus' utterance and the mandate of knowing your self, before Socrates. "The Great Man understands what is moral; the small man understands what is profitable." [102] Behind the rise of Asia is the "invisible hand" of Confucius.The Buddhist exemplars are the arhat (for Theravadins), the bodhisattva (for Mahayanists), and the lama (for Tibetan Buddhists).Daoism sides with "freedom, spontaneity, and naturalness". [101, 279]The first chapter proposes a four-part approach to comparing Religions: Each religion articulates a Problem, a Solution, a Technique, and an Exemplar.Yoruba, Atheism is briefly discussed. It does not appear to me that Prothero even arguably refutes the emergent view that those who have "spiritual experiences" are not in fact worshiping the same God. We join with Prothero in seeing the need to view the differences between our religions to discuss and understand them. He uses the word "dangerous" without spelling out why the discovery of the common theme of compassion, for example, which the Dalai Lama has clearly expounded, is dangerous! Prothero compares the religions using objective neutral criteria: diagnosis of the human condition, the offered solution, the technique to implement the solution, and the human exemplar of the faith.Compare this approach to that of Huston Smith who presses all religions into a Christian perspective, finding their sameness and even essential oneness with Christianity.Atheism is not a completed analysis. Prothero suggests that Atheism is not as influential as the great religions, but is growing in influence. Its growth is perhaps "under the radar". Prothero seems to suggest that for Atheism, religion is the problem.The subtitle is "Why Their Differences Matter". The point for all of us is that we coexist. We need to learn who we're coexisting with.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5God is not One by Stephen Prothero makes the point that all religions are indeed different. There are similarities between them, but many fundamental differences. That’s why there is conflict between nations’ political, economic, and cultural belief’s systems. Prothero therefore examines eight rival religions, viz., Islam: The Way of Submission, Christianity: The Way of Salvation, Confucianism: The way of Propriety, Hinduism: The Way of Devotion, Buddhism: The Way of Awakening, Yoruba: The Way of Connection, Judaism: The Way of Exile and Return, and Daoism: The Way of Flourishing. In the 9th Chapter a Brief Coda on Atheism: The Way of Reason was addressed. ‘“The Tao has ten thousand gates,’ say the masters,and it is up to each of us to find our own.” Prothero explains, “To explore the great religions is to wander through these ten thousand gates. It is to enter into the Hindu conversations on the logic of karma and rebirth, Christian conversation on the mechanics of sin and resurrection, and Daoist conversations on flourishing here and now (and perhaps forever). It is also to encounter rivalries between Hindus and Muslims in India, between Jews and Muslims in Israel, and between Christians and Yoruba practitioners in Nigeria. Each of these rivals offers a different vision of “a human being fully alive.” Each offers its own diagnosis of the human problem and its own prescription for a cure…. Muslims say pride is the problem; Christians say salvation is the solution; education and ritual are key Confucian techniques; and Buddhism’s exemplars are the arhat (for Theravadins), the bodhisattva (for Mahayanists), and the lama (for Tibetan Buddhists).”Conflicts at the national and international levels are to be expected. But people and societies should aim at fostering interreligious understanding to be able to work together in peace.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prothero’s title hypothesis that “God Is Not One” sets forth the notion that it is futile to try to resolve religious differences by insisting that, underneath the trappings, all are the same, and that coexistence among different faiths depends on acknowledging this.His first and last chapters set forth the proposition and solution; the remaining 300+ pages are devoted to brief histories and examinations of “the eight rival religions that run the world”. The central section, while interesting, is sometimes a slog, and the reader can be forgiven for occasionally wishing that Prothero would just get on with it and let us go on to something else.At the same time, his examinations of religions such as Yoruba, Daoism, and Confucianism – utterly foreign to most Western readers – is informative, if occasionally mind-bending. As a comparative religion primer, it’s a fine resource. As a sociological study of the ways human beings need to approach their different beliefs, it’s rather thin broth.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5If you are looking for a book that gives an honest review of Islam, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoruba, Judaism, Daoism/Taoism, and Atheism this is your book. I was assigned this as a textbook in a religion class and was bowled over.
Book preview
God Is Not One - Stephen Prothero
God Is Not One
The Eight Rival Religions
That Run the World—and Why
Their Differences Matter
Stephen Prothero
The name of the publisher, “HarperCollins e-books” is shown, with its logo as a stylized set of flames atop waves.Dedication
To my students
Epigraph
Human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in
perpetual rivalry with one another.
—Isaiah Berlin
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
A Note on Dates and Diacriticals
Introduction
Chapter One - Islam
Chapter Two - Christianity
Chapter Three - Confucianism
Chapter Four - Hinduism
Chapter Five - Buddhism
Chapter Six - Yoruba Religion
Chapter Seven - Judaism
Chapter Eight - Daoism
Chapter Nine - A Brief Coda on Atheism
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Praise
Also by Stephen Prothero
Copyright
About the Publisher
A Note on Dates and Diacriticals
Scholarly books on religion often use diacritical marks to indicate how a word is pronounced in Sanskrit or other sacred languages. In fact, use of diacriticals is a key way to signal one’s scholarly bona fides. But diacritical marks are gibberish to most readers—is that a breve (˘) or a cedilla (¸)?—so I avoid them here except in direct quotations, proper names, and citations. If an s
with a mark underneath or atop it is pronounced like sh,
then it appears here as sh
: the Hindu god Shiva instead of Śiva, the Hindu goal of moksha instead of mokşa. Diacritical marks also present a barrier to the integration of non-Christian religious terms into English—a barrier that is better torn down than built up. One reason the Sanskrit term nirvāṇa made it into English dictionaries was its willingness to drop the macron over the a and the underdot accompanying the n. And Hindu scriptures such as the Mahâbhârata and the Râmâyana are already finding wide acceptance among English speakers without their respective circumflexes.
Religious Studies scholars also typically date events either as C.E. (Common Era) or B.C.E. (before the Common Era), in an effort to avoid the Christian bias inherent in A.D. (Anno Domini, in the year of our Lord
) and B.C. (before Christ
). This is sleight of hand since these dates continue to mark events in relation to the life of Jesus whether or not those events are said to have occurred in C.E. or A.D. However, since the use of A.D. and B.C. indirectly imply belief in Jesus as both Lord
and Christ,
I use C.E. and B.C.E. here. Muslims have their own calendar, which begins with the hijra (flight
or emigration
) of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 C.E. So while this book appears in 2010 C.E., it is also being published in A.H. 1431.
Introduction
At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe and the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful and all are true. This claim, which reaches back to All Religions Are One (1795) by the English poet, printmaker, and prophet William Blake, is as odd as it is intriguing.¹ No one argues that different economic systems or political regimes are one and the same. Capitalism and socialism are so obviously at odds that their differences hardly bear mentioning. The same goes for democracy and monarchy. Yet scholars continue to claim that religious rivals such as Hinduism and Islam, Judaism and Christianity are, by some miracle of the imagination, essentially the same, and this view resounds in the echo chamber of popular culture, not least in Dan Brown’s multi-million-dollar Da Vinci Code franchise.
The most popular metaphor for this view portrays the great religions as different paths up the same mountain. It is possible to climb life’s mountain from any side, but when the top is reached the trails converge,
writes philosopher of religion Huston Smith. At base, in the foothills of theology, ritual, and organizational structure, the religions are distinct. Differences in culture, history, geography, and collective temperament all make for diverse starting points. . . . But beyond these differences, the same goal beckons.
² This is a comforting notion in a world in which religious violence often seems more present and potent than God. But is it true? If so, what might be waiting for us at the summit?
According to Mohandas Gandhi, Belief in one God is the cornerstone of all religions,
so it is toward this one God that all religious people are climbing. When it comes to divinity, however, ione s not the religions’ only number. Many Buddhists believe in no god, and many Hindus believe in thousands. Moreover, the characters of these gods differ wildly. Is God a warrior like Hinduism’s Kali or a mild-mannered wanderer like Christianity’s Jesus? Is God personal, or impersonal? Male, or female (or both)? Or beyond description altogether?
Like Gandhi, the Dalai Lama affirms that the essential message of all religions is very much the same.
³ In his view, however, what the world’s religions share is not so much God as the Good—the sweet harmony of peace, love, and understanding that religion writer Karen Armstrong also finds at the heart of every religion. To be sure, the world’s religious traditions do share many ethical precepts. No religion tells you it is okay to have sex with your mother or to murder your brother. The Golden Rule can be found not only in the Christian Bible and the Jewish Talmud but also in Confucian and Hindu books. No religion, however, sees ethics alone as its reason for being. Jews understand halakha (law
or way
) to include ritual too, and the Ten Commandments begin with how to worship God.
To be fair, those who claim that the world’s religions are one and the same do not deny the undeniable fact that they differ in some particulars. Obviously, Christians do not go on pilgrimage to Mecca, and Muslims do not practice baptism. Religious paths do diverge, Huston Smith admits, in the foothills
of dogma, rites, and institutions.⁴ To claim that all religions are the same, therefore, is not to deny the differences among a Buddhist who believes in no god, a Jew who believes in one God, and a Hindu who believes in many gods. It is simply to claim that the mathematics of divinity is a matter of the foothills. Debates over whether God has a body (yes, say Mormons; no, say Muslims) or whether human beings have souls (yes, say Hindus; no, say Buddhists) do not matter, because, as Hindu teacher Swami Sivananda writes, The fundamentals or essentials of all religions are the same. There is difference only in the non-essentials.
⁵
This is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue. For more than a generation we have followed scholars and sages down the rabbit hole into a fantasy world in which all gods are one. This wishful thinking is motivated in part by an understandable rejection of the exclusivist missionary view that only you and your kind will make it to heaven or Paradise. For most of world history, human beings have seen religious rivals as inferior to themselves—practitioners of empty rituals, perpetrators of bogus miracles, purveyors of fanciful myths. The Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century popularized the ideal of religious tolerance, and we are doubtless better for it. But the idea of religious unity is wishful thinking nonetheless, and it has not made the world a safer place. In fact, this naive theological groupthink—call it Godthink—has made the world more dangerous by blinding us to the clashes of religions that threaten us worldwide. It is time we climbed out of the rabbit hole and back to reality.
The world’s religious rivals do converge when it comes to ethics, but they diverge sharply on doctrine, ritual, mythology, experience, and law. These differences may not matter to mystics or philosophers of religion, but they matter to ordinary religious people. Muslims do not think that the pilgrimage to Mecca they call the hajj is inessential. In fact, they include it among the Five Pillars of Islam. Catholics do not think that baptism is inessential. In fact, they include it among their seven sacraments. But religious differences do not just matter to religious practitioners. They have real effects in the real world. People refuse to marry this Muslim or that Hindu because of them. And in some cases religious differences move adherents to fight and to kill.
One purpose of the all religions are one
mantra is to stop this fighting and this killing. And it is comforting to pretend that the great religions make up one big, happy family. But this sentiment, however well-intentioned, is neither accurate nor ethically responsible. God is not one. Faith in the unity of religions is just that—faith (perhaps even a kind of fundamentalism). And the leap that gets us there is an act of the hyperactive imagination.
Allergic to Argument
One reason we are willing to follow our fantasies down the rabbit hole of religious unity is that we have become uncomfortable with argument. Especially when it comes to religion, we desperately want everyone to get along. In my Boston University courses, I work hard to foster respectful arguments. My students are good with respectful,
but they are allergic to argument.
They see arguing as ill-mannered, and even among friends they avoid it at almost any cost. Though they will debate the merits of the latest Coen brothers movie or U2 CD, they agree not to disagree about almost everything else. Especially when it comes to religion, young Americans at least are far more likely to say I feel
than I think
or (God forbid) I believe.
The Jewish tradition distinguishes between arguing for the sake of victory (which it does not value) and arguing for the sake of God
(which it does).⁶ Today the West is awash in arguments on radio, television, and the Internet, but these arguments are almost always advanced not in service of the truth but for the purpose of ratings or self-aggrandizement or both. So we won’t argue for anyone’s sake and, when others do, we don’t see anything godly in it. The ideal of religious tolerance has morphed into the straitjacket of religious agreement.
Yet we know in our bones that the world’s religions are different from one another. As my colleague Adam Seligman has argued, the notion of religious tolerance assumes differences, since there is no need to tolerate a religion that is essentially the same as your own.⁷ We pretend these differences are trivial because it makes us feel safer, or more moral. But pretending that the world’s religions are the same does not make our world safer. Like all forms of ignorance, it makes our world more dangerous. What we need on this furiously religious planet is a realistic view of where religious rivals clash and where they can cooperate. Approaching this volatile topic from this new angle may be scary. But the world is what it is. And both tolerance and respect are empty virtues until we actually know something about whomever it is we are supposed to be tolerating or respecting.
Pretend Pluralism
Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions has sold over two million copies since it first appeared in 1958 as The Religions of Man. One source of its success is Smith’s earnest and heartfelt proclamation of the essential unity of the world’s religions. Focusing on the timeless ideals of what he calls our wisdom traditions,
Smith emphasizes spiritual experience, keeping the historical facts, institutional realities, and ritual observances to a minimum. His exemplars are extraordinary rather than ordinary practitioners—mystics such as Islam’s al-Ghazali, Christianity’s St. John of the Cross, and Daoism’s Zhuangzi. By his own admission, Smith writes about religions at their best,
showcasing their cleaner side
rather than airing their dirty laundry, emphasizing their inspired
philosophies and theologies over wars and rumors thereof. He writes sympathetically and in the American idioms of optimism and hope. When it comes to religion, Smith writes, things are better than they seem.
⁸
When Smith wrote these words over a half century ago, they struck just the right chord. In the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, partisans of what was coming to be known as the Judeo-Christian tradition were coming to see Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism as three equal expressions of one common faith. Meanwhile, fans of Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy (1945) and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) were denouncing the longstanding human tendency to divide the world’s religions into two categories: the false ones and your own. The world’s religions, they argued, are different paths up the same mountain. Or, as Swami Sivananda put it, The Koran or the Zend-Avesta or the Bible is as much a sacred book as the Bhagavad-Gita. . . . Ahuramazda, Isvara, Allah, Jehovah are different names for one God.
⁹ Today this approach is the new orthodoxy, enshrined in bestselling books by Karen Armstrong and in Bill Moyers’ television interviews with Joseph Campbell, Huston Smith, and other leading advocates of the perennial philosophy.
This perennialism may seem to be quite pluralistic, but only at first glance. Catholic theologian Karl Rahner has been rightly criticized for his theory that many Buddhists, Hindus, and Jews are actually anonymous Christians
who will make it to heaven in the world to come. Conservative Catholics see this theory as a violation of their longstanding conviction that outside the church there is no salvation.
But liberals also condemn Rahner’s theology, in their case as condescending. It would be impossible to find anywhere in the world,
writes Catholic theologian Hans Küng, a sincere Jew, Muslim or atheist who would not regard the assertion that he is an ‘anonymous Christian’ as presumptuous.
¹⁰
The perennial philosophers, however, are no less presumptuous. They, too, conscript outsiders into their tradition quite against their will. When Huxley’s guru Swami Prabhavananda says that all religions lead to God, the God he is imagining is Hindu. And when my Hindu students quote their god Krishna in their scripture the Bhagavad Gita (4:11)—In whatsoever way any come to Me, in that same way I grant them favor
—the truth they are imagining is a Hindu truth. Just a few blocks away from my office stands the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society. Its chapel looks conspicuously like a mainline Protestant church, yet at the front of this worship space sit images of various Hindu deities, and around the room hang symbols of the world’s religions—a star and crescent for Islam, a dharma wheel for Buddhism, a cross for Christianity, a Star of David for Judaism. When my friend Swami Tyagananda, who runs this Society, says that all religions are one, he is speaking as a person of faith and hope. When Huston Smith says that all religions are one, he is speaking in the same idiom.
I understand what these men are doing. They are not describing the world but reimagining it. They are hoping that their hope will call up in us feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood. In the face of religious bigotry and bloodshed, past and present, we cannot help but be drawn to such vision, and such hope. Yet, we must see both for what they are, not mistaking either for clear-eyed analysis. And we must admit that there are situations where a lack of understanding about the differences between, say, Sunni and Shia Islam produces more rather than less violence. Unfortunately, we live in a world where religion seems as likely to detonate a bomb as to defuse one. So while we need idealism, we need realism even more. We need to understand religious people as they are—not just at their best but also their worst. We need to look at not only their awe-inspiring architecture and gentle mystics but also their bigots and suicide bombers.
Religion Matters
Whether the world’s religions are more alike than different is one of the crucial questions of our time. Until recently, most sociologists were sure that religion was fading away, that as countries industrialized and modernized, they would become more secular. And religion is receding today in many Western European countries. But more than nine out of every ten Americans believe in God, and, with the notable exception of Western Europe, the rest of the world is furiously religious. Across Latin America and Africa and Asia, religion matters to Christians who praise Jesus after the birth of a child, to Muslims who turn to Allah for comfort as they are facing cancer, and to Hindus who appeal to the goddess Lakshmi to bring them health, wealth, and wisdom. And it still matters in Western Europe, too, where Catholic attitudes toward women and the body, for example, continue to inform everyday life in Spain and Italy, and where the call to prayer goes up five times a day in mosques from Amsterdam to Paris to Berlin.
But religion is not merely a private affair. It matters socially, economically, politically, and militarily. Religion may or may not move mountains, but it is one of the prime movers in politics worldwide. It moves elections in the United States, where roughly half of all Americans say they would not vote for an atheist, and in India, which has in the Hindutva (Hinduness) movement its own version of America’s Religious Right. Religion moves economies too. Pilgrims to Mecca and Jerusalem pump billions of dollars per year into the economies of Saudi Arabia and Israel. Sales of the Bible in the United States alone run roughly $500 million annually, and Islamic banking approaches $1 trillion.¹¹
All too often world history is told as if religion did not matter. The Spanish conquered New Spain for gold, and the British came to New England to catch fish. The French Revolution had nothing to do with Catholicism, and the U.S. civil rights movement was a purely humanitarian endeavor. But even if religion makes no sense to you, you need to make sense of religion to make sense of the world.
In the twenty-first century alone, religion has toppled the Bamiyan statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan and the Twin Towers in New York City. It has stirred up civil war in Sri Lanka and Darfur. And it has resisted coalition troops in Iraq. In many countries, religion has a powerful say in determining what people will eat and under what circumstances they can be married or divorced. Religious rivalries are either simmering or boiling over in Myanmar, Uganda, Sudan, and Kurdistan. The contest over Jerusalem and the Middle East is at least as religious as it is economic or political. Hinduism and Buddhism were key motivators in the decades-long civil war that recently ravaged Sri Lanka. And religion remains a major motivator in Kashmir, where two nuclear powers, the Hindu-majority state of India and the Muslim-majority state of Pakistan, remain locked in an ancient territorial dispute with palpable religious overtones. Our understanding of these battlefields is not advanced one inch by the dogma that all religions are one.
Toxic and Tonic
The beginning of the twenty-first century saw dozens of bestselling books in both Europe and the United States by so-called New Atheists. Writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Michel Onfray preach their own version of Godthink, aping the perennial philosophers by loading all religions into one boat. This crew, however, sees only the shared sins of the great religions—the same idiocy, the same oppression. Look at the Crusades, 9/11, and all the religiously inspired violence in between, they say. Look at the ugly legacies of sexist (and sexually repressed) scriptures. Religion is hazardous to your health and poisonous to society.
Of course, religion does not exist in the abstract. You cannot practice religion in general any more than you can speak language in general. So generalizing about the overall effects of religion is a hazard of its own. Nonetheless, the main thesis of the New Atheists is surely true: religion is one of the greatest forces for evil in world history. Yet religion is also one of the greatest forces for good. Religions have put God’s stamp of approval on all sorts of demonic schemes, but religions also possess the power to say no to evil and banality. Yes, religion gave us the Inquisition. Closer to our own time, it gave us the assassinations of Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat by Islamic extremists, of Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish gunman, and of India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi by Sikh bodyguards. But religion also gave us abolitionism and the civil rights movement. Many, perhaps most, of the world’s greatest paintings, novels, sculptures, buildings, and musical compositions are also religiously inspired. Without religion, there would be no Alhambra or Angkor Wat, no reggae or Gregorian chant, no Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci or Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, no Shusaku Endo’s Silence or Elie Wiesel’s Night.
Political scientists assume that human beings are motivated primarily by power, while economists assume that they are motivated primarily by greed. It is impossible, however, to understand the actions of individuals, communities, societies, or nations in purely political or economic terms. You don’t have to believe in the power of prayer to see the power of religious beliefs and behaviors to stir people to action. Religion was behind both the creation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in 1947 and the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, both the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.
When I was a professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta, I required my students to read Nazi theology. I wanted them to understand how some Christians bent the words of the Bible into weapons aimed at Jews and how these weapons found their mark at Auschwitz and Dachau. My Christian students responded to these disturbing readings with one disturbing voice: the Nazis were not real Christians, they informed me, since real Christians would never kill Jews in crematories. I found this response terrifying, and I still do, since failing to grasp how Nazism was fueled by ancient Christian hatred of Jews as Christ killers
allows Christians to absolve themselves of any responsibility for reckoning with how their religion contributed to these horrors.
After 9/11 many Muslims absolved themselves too. The terrorists whose faith turned jets into weapons of mass destruction—who left Qurans in their suitcases and shouted Allahu Akbar
(God is great
) as they bore down on their targets—were not real Muslims, they said. Real Muslims would never kill women and children and civilians. So they, too, absolved themselves of any responsibility for reckoning with the dark side of their tradition.
Is religion toxic or tonic? Is it one of the world’s greatest forces for evil, or one of the world’s greatest forces for good? Yes and yes, which is to say that religion is a force far too powerful to ignore. Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist convinced that he had given too much quarter to Muslims when he agreed to the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan. But Gandhi’s strategy of satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance, was inspired by religion too, deeply influenced by the Jain principle of ahimsa (noninjury) and by the pacifism of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Yes, religion gave the United States the racist hatred of the Ku Klux Klan, but it also put an end to discriminatory Jim Crow legislation.
Today it is impossible to understand American politics without knowing something about the Bible used to swear in U.S. presidents and evoked almost daily on the floor of the U.S. Congress. It is impossible to understand politics in India and the economy of China without knowing something about Hinduism and Confucianism. At the dawn of the twentieth century, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. DuBois prophesied that the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
The events of 9/11 and beyond suggest that the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the religion line.¹²
Koyaanisqatsi
What the world’s religions share is not so much a finish line as a starting point. And where they begin is with this simple observation: something is wrong with the world. In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi tells us that life is out of balance. Shakespeare’s Hamlet tells us that there is something rotten not only in the state of Denmark but also in the state of human existence. Hindus say we are living in the kali yuga, the most degenerate age in cosmic history. Buddhists say that human existence is pockmarked by suffering. Jewish, Christian, and Islamic stories tell us that this life is not Eden; Zion, heaven, and Paradise lie out ahead.
Religious folk worldwide agree that something has gone awry. They part company, however, when it comes to stating just what has gone wrong, and they diverge sharply when they move from diagnosing the human problem to prescribing how to solve it. Christians see sin as the problem, and salvation from sin as the religious goal. Buddhists see suffering (which, in their tradition, is not ennobling) as the problem, and liberation from suffering as the religious goal. If practitioners of the world’s religions are all mountain climbers, then they are on very different mountains, climbing very different peaks, and using very different tools and techniques in their ascents.
Because religious traditions do not stay static as they move into new centuries, countries, and circumstances, the differences inside each of the world’s religions are vast. Religious Studies scholars are quick to point out that there are many Buddhisms, not just one. And so it goes with all the world’s religions. Christians align themselves with Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism, and fast-growing Mormonism may well be emerging as Christianity’s fourth way. Jews call themselves Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and secular. Hindus worship a dizzying variety of gods in a dizzying variety of ways. And as every American and European soldier who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan can attest, Shia and Sunni Islam are in many respects quite distinct.
While I do not believe we are not witnessing a clash of civilizations
between Christianity and Islam, it is a fantasy to imagine that the world’s two largest religions are in any meaningful sense the same, or that interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims will magically bridge the gap. You would think that champions of multiculturalism would warm to this fact, glorying in the diversity inside and across religious traditions. But even among multiculturalists, the tendency is to pretend that the differences between, say, Christianity and Islam are more apparent than real, and that the differences inside religious traditions just don’t warrant the fuss practitioners continue to make over them. Meanwhile, the worldwide Anglican Communion splinters over homosexuality, and in the United States hot-button issues such as abortion and stem-cell research drive Protestants into two opposing camps.
For more than a century, scholars have searched for the essence of religion. They thought they found this holy grail in God, but then they discovered Buddhists and Jains who deny God’s existence. Today it is widely accepted that there is no one essence that all religions share. What they share are family resemblances—tendencies toward this belief or that behavior. In the family of religions, kin tend to perform rituals. They tend to tell stories about how life and death began and to write down these stories in scriptures. They tend to cultivate techniques of ecstasy and devotion. They tend to organize themselves into institutions and to gather in sacred places at sacred times. They tend to instruct human beings how to act toward one another. They tend to profess this belief or that about the gods and the supernatural. They tend to invest objects and places with sacred import. Philosopher of religion Ninian Smart has referred to these tendencies as the seven dimensions
of religion: the ritual, narrative, experiential, institutional, ethical, doctrinal, and material dimensions.¹³
These family resemblances are just tendencies, however. Just as there are tall people in short families (none of the men in Michael Jordan’s family was over six feet tall), there are religions that deny the existence of God and religions that get along just fine without creeds. Something is a religion when it shares enough of this DNA to belong to the family of religions. What makes the members of this family different (and themselves) is how they mix and match these dimensions. Experience is central in Daoism and Buddhism. Hinduism and Judaism emphasize the narrative dimension. The ethical dimension is crucial in Confucianism. The Islamic and Yoruba traditions are to a great extent about ritual. And doctrine is particularly important to Christians.
The world’s religious rivals are clearly related, but they are more like second cousins than identical twins. They do not teach the same doctrines. They do not perform the same rituals. And they do not share the same goals.
Different Problems, Different Goals
After I wrote Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t (2007), I received many letters and emails from readers confessing their ignorance of the world’s religions and asking for a single book they could read to become religiously literate. This book is written for them. It attends to the idiosyncrasies of each of the great religions: for example, Yoruba practitioners’ preoccupation with power, Daoists’ emphasis on naturalness, and Muslims’ attention to the world to come.
At the heart of this project is a simple, four-part approach to the religions, which I have been using for years in the classroom and at lectures around the world. Each religion articulates:
a problem;
a solution to this problem, which also serves as the religious goal;
a technique (or techniques) for moving from this problem to this solution; and
an exemplar (or exemplars) who chart this path from problem to solution.
For example, in Christianity . . .
the problem is sin;
the solution (or goal) is salvation;
the technique for achieving salvation is some combination of faith and good works; and
the exemplars who chart this path are the saints in Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy and ordinary people of faith in Protestantism.
And in Buddhism . . .
the problem is suffering;
the solution (or goal) is nirvana;
the technique for achieving nirvana is the Noble Eightfold Path, which includes such classic Buddhist practices as meditation and chanting; and
the exemplars who chart this path are arhats (for Theravada Buddhists), bodhisattvas (for Mahayana Buddhists), or lamas (for Vajrayana Buddhists).
This four-step approach is admittedly simplistic. You cannot sum up thousands of years of Christian faith or Buddhist practice in four sentences. So this model is just a starting point and must be nuanced along the way. For example, Roman Catholics and Protestants are divided about how to achieve salvation, just as Mahayana and Theravada Buddhists are divided about how to achieve nirvana (or whether nirvana is an achievement
at all). One of the virtues of this simple scheme, however, is that it helps to make plain the differences across and inside the religious traditions. Are Buddhists trying to achieve salvation? Of course not, since they don’t even believe in sin. Are Christians trying to achieve nirvana? No, since for them suffering isn’t something that must be overcome. In fact, it might even be a good thing.
This book is addressed to both religious and nonreligious people. You don’t have to believe in God to want to understand how beliefs in God have transformed individuals and societies from ancient Israel to contemporary China. And you don’t have to be baptized into Christianity or married to a Muslim to want to understand the work that rituals do to the people who undergo and administer them. So this book is written for nonbelievers. But it is written for practitioners too, and for seekers on sacred journeys of their own. The spiritually curious searching for new questions or new answers will find plenty of both in the lives of the Hindus, Confucians, and Jews explored in this book. And even those who are settled in their religious (or nonreligious) ways should find opportunities to reimagine their religious commitments (or lack thereof) by comparing and contrasting them with different ways of being religious.
Much is missing here. Shinto is not covered. Neither is Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Wicca, or the Baha’i faith. Also neglected are new religious movements such as Rastafarianism and Scientology. But the religion I most regret excluding is Sikhism. I am the adviser to Boston University’s Sikh Association, and some of my best students have been Sikhs. I had to draw the line somewhere, however, and I drew it on this side of the world’s 25 million or so practitioners of Sikhism.
Included in this book are the great religions of the Middle East (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), India (Hinduism and Buddhism), and East Asia (Confucianism and Daoism). Also included is the Yoruba religion of West Africa and its diasporas. In textbooks on the world’s religions, this tradition is often lumped in with Native American, Australian, and other African primitive
or primal
religions. But Yoruba religion is a great religion, too, claiming perhaps 100 million adherents and spanning the globe from its homeland in West Africa to South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and the United States.
Although these religions appear here in discreet chapters, none really stands alone. As Confucians are quick to remind us, no human being is an island, and as Jewish philosopher Abraham Heschel once wrote, No religion is an island
either.¹⁴ One of the great themes of world history is interreligious contact, and interreligious conflict, collaboration, and combination have only accelerated in recent times. So this book aims to present the eight great religions not in isolation but in contact, and comparison. You can learn a lot about your own religion by comparing it with others. As the German philologist and comparative religionist Max Müller famously put it, He who knows one, knows none.
¹⁵
Great Is Not Necessarily Good
Muslims have long insisted that only God is great. Still, this book refers to the world’s major religions as great. What does this mean? First, it does not mean that they are good. For more than a generation, writers on religion have acted on the conviction that the way toward interreligious understanding was to emphasize not only the similarities of the world’s religions but also their essential goodness. This impulse is understandable. No fair-minded scholar wants to perpetuate stereotypes, often rooted in missionary polemics, about Islam as sexist, Hinduism as idol obsessed, or African religions as satanic. But it is time to grow out of this reflex to defend. After 9/11 and the Holocaust, we need to see the world’s religions as they really are—in all their gore and glory. This includes seeing where they agree and disagree, and not turning a blind eye to their failings.
Since 1927, Time magazine has named a person of the year. Some of these men and women—Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill come to mind—have been great in the sense of good. But goodness has not been a requirement for Time’s editors, who try simply to identify the person who, for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year.
(Hitler was Time’s choice in 1938, and Stalin in 1939 and 1942.) In selecting the religions for this book, I have not made any effort to separate the wheat from the chaff. I have simply tried to include religions that are both widespread and weighty—religions that for better or worse
have been particularly influential over time and continue to influence us today.¹⁶
The world’s religions appear here not in chronological order of their founding but in order of influence—from the most to the least great. But how do you determine greatness? Statistics obviously matter. Strictly by the numbers, Christianity and Islam, which together account for over half of the world’s population, are the greatest; Judaism, with a mere 14 million adherents, is in last place by far. But another key factor is historical significance. On this score Judaism may well be the greatest, since it gave birth to both Christianity and Islam. In the end, however, the rankings presented here focus first and foremost on contemporary impact—to what extent each religion moves us and shakes us and sends us scrambling after words.
While researching this book, I asked friends and students which religion they thought was the most influential. I got back a litany of possibilities, including communism. A strong case was made for Confucianism, which has been a prime mover behind the East Asian economic miracle of the last generation and is booming in China now that the government is promoting Confucian ideals as a supplement to (and a possible replacement for) dying Marxist and Leninist ideology. But Christianity and Islam are the two greatest religions today. They are the traditions that draw the atheists’ ire. And they are the ones that are redrawing the geopolitical map.
The Greatest Religion
The case for Christianity’s preeminence is compelling. In the United States, the most powerful country in the world, Christianity is the religion par excellence. The world’s number one bestseller, the Bible, is the scripture of American politics, widely quoted in inaugural addresses and on the floor of the House and Senate. And the overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens call themselves Christians, as has every U.S. president from Washington on. In the wider world, however, there is no majority religion. In fact, no one religion claims more than a third of what is an intensely competitive global religious marketplace. So worldwide the question of greatness is not so cut-and-dried.
Nonetheless, Islam is the Muhammad Ali of the world’s religions. Statistically, it is second to Christianity, but its numbers are growing far more rapidly. Over the last century, the Christian portion of the world’s population has declined slightly—from 35 percent in 1900 to 33 percent today. And in Europe many of these Christians are nominal practitioners at best. Over this same period, Islam’s numbers have skyrocketed—from 12 percent of the world’s population in 1900 to 22 percent today.¹⁷ According to the World Religion Database, Islam is growing 33 percent faster than is Christianity, largely thanks to high birth rates in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Egypt, Iran, and other countries where Islam predominates.¹⁸ So while Christianity’s market share has stalled, Islam’s is racing ahead at a breakneck pace.
Numbers aside, Islam is the leader of the pack in terms of contemporary impact. Many Christians render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, restricting their faith to the private realm. Muslims, by contrast, have never accepted this public/private distinction. Most see Islam as both a religion and a way of life. This way of life affects how they dress, what they eat, and how they invest, spend, and lend money. So the religious commitments of Muslims have a huge impact on the world around them.
Islam and Christianity are both missionary religions that have been competing for converts since the birth of Islam in the seventh century. As the modern age opened, Islam was ascendant, taking Constantinople in 1453 and rapidly expanding over the next few centuries across Europe and the Middle East into North Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. Over the last few centuries, however, and especially since the fall